AgData Integrity: Ensuring trust and accountability

I received many queries from our clients regarding data ownership and privacy. The first startup I founded with my best friend, Alberto Acedo,  was a genetic diagnostic center focused on human diseases, mainly hereditary cancer, where we dealt with human DNA data. This data is extremely sensitive and needs to be reliable and secured at the same time. A doctor was making patient decisions based on our reports, so they should be fully trusted. We learned much about the value of data and the need for secured and encrypted measures for confidentiality and data integrity.

We both come from an agricultural region and wanted to help farmers to optimize their operations and solve the most relevant problems in agriculture. When we founded Biome Makers in 2015, we took the same approach to generate new valuable data for agriculture. With Biome Makers, we shared a passion for helping the agricultural community find solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time: producing enough food to feed the world and restoring our soils along the way. Together, we can do this by using the agdata that sits underneath our soils.

Agdata can be a powerful tool for growers, consultants, retailers, and manufacturers to add to their toolbox. However, data privacy is a concern when exploring precision agriculture. Two key threats to information security are confidentiality and integrity. Agriculture Technology demands high-quality data to address challenges in the field. To ensure that the collected data allows one to take clear action, data collection should undergo extremely diligent protocols in order to support customers and protect their information. 

We, as an independent, neutral provider, do not share the collected data of our customers with entities outside of Biome Makers and remain a trusted partner to our clients and collaborators. The analyses we provide are solely backed by science and not influenced by outside control or another company’s authority. While we are supported by investors, the firms share the same vision to bring ecological balance into modern global food production systems. For a list of organizations that support us and utilize our technology, check out our website. 

AgData. How can it help in the field?

Through our independent, proprietary, and patented soil management platform and BeCrop® technology, we partner with growers, retailers, and ag input manufacturers to deliver high-quality, science-driven data on soil biology that encourages stakeholders to make informed decisions in the field e.g., saving costs, mobilizing the existing nutrients reservoir, predicting disease risks in time to act, and selecting the most effective inputs based on the soil microbial profile. But how do we examine soil biology? 

At Biome Makers, we use BeCrop® technology which consists of our database that contains over 24M taxonomic references using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques. We use proprietary DNA sequencing workflow and intelligent computing to monitor the most relevant bio-indicators. Our technology analyzes the functional dimensions of the existing microbiome network, provides ecological insights and advances knowledge about the soil microbiome. BeCrop® technology is the first Intelligence Computing System (ICS) based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a proprietary database of soil microbes from more than 122 crops analyzed from 40+ countries worldwide. Our analyses require the geolocation information so that the metadata can be used to map the allocations of samples to their corresponding blocks, defining and drawing comparisons between various blocks as well as calculating weather and soil data. Once the samples have been delivered to our certified USDA and CDFA compliant laboratories, we leverage the soil microbiome, environmental data, and machine learning to analyze soil functionality. 

Scientific and data integrity is very important to us and continues to fuel our company. We invite the agricultural community to share their thoughts about the importance of data integrity beyond legal requirements and what steps they take to ensure the quality data collected is reliably and accurately analyzed and then stored confidentially. 

The data we provide is an innovative way to connect soil life to a digital Decision Support System, that agronomists and farmers can use with confidence.